We’re excited to be partnering with AthenaBridge in offering you an exciting new online to tool to – what else – identify asteroids! Of course, the tool can be used for whatever kind of organizational or civic issue you’d like to launch a deliberation on. An exponential improvement on online discussions to date (you know, the ones that go in circles), we’re digging this software. Here’s the blurb from AthenaBridge: “AthenaBridge software helps organizations sort through complex issues by engaging their members in productive online deliberation.” Help us play with it and both suggest and vote for or against asteroids, as well as for and against support for asteroid status!

Just in the nick of time, Discovery News has shared the top 10 ways we might deflect an asteroid heading to earth. (They must have heard about our newly minted Asteroids Club.) They include cool tricks like deflecting it with mirrors and painting it white?! Not a single recommendation, however, includes “ignore it and get back to partisan gamesmanship.”

“…the longer we put [a solution] off the more we make the world nervous, the higher the interest rates are going to be, the quicker we’re going to have to face a day of horrible calamity. So just the act of compromise itself… would give us even more time, would allow both sides even longer to spread out the pain, to reach even more compromise down the road… [It’s] a math problem – a really solvable math problem.” — Adam Davidson, host of NPR’s Planet Money

Hat tip to Asteroids Clubber Eric L for pointing us to an excellent video of a good messager (of a talk given an TED) to deliver the message about entitlement and budget deficit issues to a liberal audience.